“Duty To Remember”

by Lt. Col. Nguyen Gia Tien, MD

“Duty to remember” is translated from the French
expression “Devoir de memoire”. It normally means the duty, the advice or the
obligation, for the sake of human conscience, not to forget Nazism’s horrendous
genocide which killed 6 million Jews in the Second World War. This crime was so
enormous it went beyond what was considered human behavior to become completely
inhuman. Humanity should never be allowed to forget this tragedy, this crime
committed by man against man. The younger generation in Europe has been
constantly reminded of this genocide by German Fascism. This tragedy, called
Shoah or Holocaust, has been part of the curriculum at European schools so that
students wouldn’t forget.

Europeans convincingly say that they did so not
because they simply “hate Hitler” or just to “remember the past”, but because
they worry about the present and the future. They believe that if the younger
generations are given complete information to realize how an insane and a
murderous ideology has resulted in millions of innocent people being destroyed,
there will be more chance of this tragedy not being repeated.

Recently on Jan 27, 2005 Europe celebrated the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz (Poland) concentration camp where
the Nazis had annihilated over 1 million Jews by gassing and cremation. Many
schools have sent students to visit the old concentration camp and see the
crematoriums which are still preserved as a museum displaying the crimes of
Nazism. Heart breaking pictures are shown of hundreds of nude women detainees,
some holding their children, lining up to enter a tunnel leading to the
crematorium. They didn’t know they were going to be cremated because the SS
guards told them they were going to get a shower!

The Campaign to remind people of the Holocaust is
not so much about remembering the past, but to have an effect on the future. It
reminds young generations of Europeans of the “Duty to remember” this great
tragedy, because it could happen again. In some European countries we have seen
the emergence of a few Neo Nazis among certain extremists. However, that should
lead to nowhere because young people are now aware of the “duty to remember”.

In Vietnam quite a few tragedies took place during
the past decades. However, the concept of “duty to remember” those tragedies
hasn’t been encouraged. It hasn’t been part of the Vietnamese “tradition”.
People have been told to forget! “Forget the past, look forward to the future”
seems to be today’s slogan.

Since the days when Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese
Communists introduced Marxism into Vietnam, tragedies have been common
occurrences in this country for half a century. And unfortunately, they were
instigated by Vietnamese against Vietnamese, people of the same ancestry!

In the recent “Black book on Communism” by
historian Stephane Courtois, statistics were shown that crimes committed by
communist regimes far exceeded those of Nazism. This conspiracy to eliminate
whole classes of people was no different from genocide. The victims killed by
Communism could number up to a hundred million. Ho chi Minh’s legacy in this
regard ranked as high as other butchers’ like Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung or Stalin…

As a matter of fact, within two decades, two
massive exodus of refugees took place in Vietnam. One million people had to
leave North Vietnam to go to South Vietnam (1954). Then, three more million had
to escape overseas to be scattered all over the world since 1975, with hundreds
of thousands of them lost at sea while attempting to do so. This kind of
tragedy had never happened to any country in the world. It never happened in
Vietnamese history before, even during a thousand years of Chinese domination or
a hundred years under the French. Only the Vietnamese Communists could have
achieved that in a couple of decades!

Then there were other tragedies such as the
“Agrarian reform” (1953-1956) carried out through the Chinese Communists’
instigation in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, thousands more
were buried alive during the Tet offensive (1968). Hundreds of thousands were
imprisoned and tortured in concentration camps (1975).

All of the above tragedies are well known to be
caused by the Hanoi communist regime. In the future, when this regime is bound
to collapse, many more crimes will certainly be uncovered.

And all that killing and misfortune only led to a
present day Vietnam as one of the poorest nations in the world, under a corrupt
and brutal regime.

The most accurate observation of the
Communists’crimes came from none other than Tran Do, a veteran communist
activist who had to admit that the Vietnamese Communists’ crimes rivaled the
ones committed by Chinese Emperor Tan and by Hitler put together. Tran Do’s
assertion, although disputed by some people, testifies to the fact that the
Communists did bring about extensive genocide throughout Vietnam.

After North Vietnam fell to the Communists, all the
tragedies they had experienced seemed to be forgotten by the Vietnamese people.
No lessons seemed to have been learned. During all the recent war years in
South Vietnam, some intellectual and religious activists ,under the “anti-war”
or “third party” umbrella, did not want to learn from history and neglected
their “duty to remember”. Unintentionally or not, they helped the Communists
rapidly take over the South.

Nowadays, after decades of living in foreign
countries, the Vietnamese refugees’ memory seems to be getting worse. A number
of “intellectual refugees” don’t seem to understand why three million Vietnamese
ended up living outside their own country. They are helping a group of
communist sympathizers at the University of Massachusetts “re-write a new
identity” for the Vietnamese expatriates.

Recently, other calls for “forget the past, no more
hatred” have been sounded. They seem to see nothing in the past fifty years of
Vietnam’s history. Nothing remarkable, no tragedies!

And the Vietnamese younger generation would have
learned nothing and be ready again to be drawn into more tragedies in the
future. Europeans are wiser. They see what is coming and try to teach their
younger generation the “duty to remember”.

Vietnam’s history will continue, but there is no
guarantee that such tragedies wouldn’t happen again. There is no guarantee that
such criminals as the communist groups under Ho chi Minh wouldn’t reappear under
a different form.

One can’t help wondering if the “duty to remember”
for the Vietnamese people is being remembered and carried out sufficiently to
prevent more tragedies in the future?